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Pork, Salted, for Larding
In salting pork it is well to put aside a piece to be used exclusively for larding, and for this to omit saltpetre altogether, and merely rub it well with salt, put a weight upon it, and leave it for five or six weeks, until it is ready for smoking. If saltpetre is rubbed into bacon which is to be used for larding, there will be danger that the lardoons will impart a pink tinge to the white meats that come in contact with them.
This is a curing instruction, not a cooking one, and it is the rare entry in the book that cannot be followed as printed. The points below explain what it is for and why the method is unsafe by current standards.
- What larding isLardoons are strips of firm back fat threaded through lean meat with a larding needle so that it bastes from the inside. Cassell's assumes every household has a side of home-cured pork to cut them from; the modern equivalent is bought unsmoked fatback or the fat cap from a pork loin, or simply barding with sheets of fat tied over the outside.
- Why the saltpetre is omittedThe reasoning in the original is sound and worth understanding: potassium nitrate fixes the pink colour in cured meat, and a nitrated lardoon run through a veal cutlet or a chicken breast would leave pink streaks through pale flesh. That is why this entry directs that the piece reserved for larding be cured with salt alone.
- No measured cure"Rub it well with salt" gives no ratio of salt to meat weight. Safe dry-curing depends on reaching a known salt concentration throughout the piece, which cannot be judged by rubbing; the surface can be heavily salted while the interior stays well below any protective level.
- No temperatureFive or six weeks is specified with no holding temperature. A Victorian larder in winter ran cold and reasonably steady; a modern room does not. Curing with salt alone at an unknown ambient temperature over weeks leaves the outcome uncontrolled, with risk of spoilage organisms and, where conditions turn anaerobic, of Clostridium botulinum -- which is the organism nitrate and nitrite are included in modern cures to suppress. Removing the saltpetre for cosmetic reasons removes that protection.
- The smoking stepThe entry says only that the meat is 'ready for smoking' and specifies nothing further. If read as cold smoking, that is a process generally held below about 85F so the meat does not cook, often over many hours or days, and it depends on measured cure, monitored temperature and known times -- none of which this entry supplies.
- If you want cured fatUse a current, tested curing formula with weighed salt, a specified curing salt, and stated temperatures, or buy cured fatback. Do not scale up or reconstruct the method above.
Larding was one of the defining techniques of nineteenth-century cookery because the meat of the period demanded it: lean, grass-fed, often mature animals, cooked long at open fires or in coal ovens, dried out without inserted fat. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, a large household compendium generally dated to around the turn of the century, treats the subject, and, as here, the keeping of a dedicated piece of cure aside for the purpose. The colour anxiety behind the entry is genuine and still holds: saltpetre had been used in meat curing for centuries before its nitrate chemistry was understood, and cooks knew empirically that it turned meat pink long before anyone could explain the reaction with myoglobin. The technique faded through the twentieth century as pork and beef became fattier and marbling was bred in, and larding needles are now largely a charcuterie and restaurant tool rather than a domestic one.